Rise of Lost Empires

Quick Bits is an impression of the downloadable title I’m playing at the moment. It’s a thumbnail sketch of what I think of a game.

Real-time strategy games are hard to do on anything except a PC. Many have tried to bring the genre to consoles and few have actually succeeded. If you’re a purist keeping score, you would say that no one has really captured the feel of an RTS on consoles.

So what about the iPhone? Rise of Lost Empires is an attempt to do the genre justice on a mobile device, and at first blush, the concept seems to work. Playing the game almost reminded me of playing R.U.S.E. on a touch-screen table.

Some of the concepts were there. On the iPhone, you can draw a box to select multiple units and point to the area where you want to move. You can select all units of one type by double-tapping one.

Elsewhere, each hero has a special ability that’s activated by first hitting an icon on the corner and picking the power on a wheel. Gameloft even managed to add simple base building in the gameplay.

The whole concept could almost work except that this RTS runs into problems with real estate. Playing Rise of Lost Empires on the iPhone’s relatively small screen is like swimming the 100-meter freestyle in a kiddie pool.

There’s not enough room to operate at times and touching places like flags (the node points to build bases) can be frustratingly difficult because the game misreads your intentions. When you want to hit a flag to build a structure on your base, the game reads it as movement and it will send your troops to that place. Other times, you’ll want to move to one part of the map, but an inadvertent touch moves the screen elsewhere.

This can get especially frustrating when your guys are battling the orc hordes that come crashing through the castle gates.

Value: If you can endure the wonky controls, then this game is fairly decent. At $4.99, it may not be worth it if you’re not a fan of the genre. But if love StarCraft, Command and Conquer or WarCraft III, then the title could pique your interest just for the novelty alone. There’s nothing spectacular about the Rise of Lost Empires. It looks like an RTS done on an SNES. The animations are remedial. It isn’t particularly original. But the game does have its moments and if it were a little cheaper, like say $1.99, even with its flaw, it could be worth it.